icks, slowly. "Yes, she is
right. The sin of presumptuousness was visited upon that unhappy place."

"Do you mean to say"--Swift started up. Somehow he had forgotten
Russell, its mysterious fate, his mission, everything but the girl. He
had awaked to his duty. "Do you mean to say that the whole thing is due
to e--?"

"Hold on! Look below!" interrupted the professor.

They clung to the ropes and glued their gaze upon the sight so far
beneath them. The storm had magically cleared away. The sunlight now
pierced the whole landscape for the first time since the disaster. The
lost city, in black, shapeless ruins, lay directly beneath them.

"We will go down." The professor opened the safety-valve cautiously.
"The devil has been chased away by the storm," he said emphatically.

Indeed, the baleful vapor had gone. As they swiftly descended strange
sights met their eyes. They could still see everything microscopically
for a radius of twenty miles around. Black specks were rushing up the
stricken railroad tracks, along the roads, hurrying to the city of doom.
Linemen began to extend the wires; trackmen began laying new tracks.
Fully fifty thousand impatient men were madly plunging these twenty
miles from different points of the circumference, converging toward
Russell. The dead line had become a mysterious thing of the past. The
danger to life was over, and it became an unprecedented race to see who
would get first upon the spot.

"If this calm lasts, as I think it will, we will be on the ground two
hours ahead of the crowd."

Swift's eyes sparkled in reportorial ecstasy.

There was no time now nor inclination for words. In ten minutes the
_High Tariff_ was within a few hundred feet of the doomed city. Buzzards
followed its descent curiously.

"My kingdom for a notebook!" cried Swift, in anguish.

"Take mine," said his companion, shyly, "and my stylo, too."

Swift would have been more moved by this attention had he not been
absorbed in the sight at his feet.

"Do you mean," he turned to Mr. Ticks, "that this is all the effect of
e----?"

"Look sharp, now!" interrupted Professor Ariel. "Stand ready to be cut
down!" The Professor had manipulated the safety-valve so skilfully that
in another minute they grazed the serrated ground. They were not hurt.
One wide sweep of the professor's knife, and the _High Tariff_ freed now
from all restraint, bounded away never to be seen again.

"I am sorry, Professor Ariel," said S